Thursday, October 27, 2011

If there is anything more mind numbing than inexpertly painting the inside of a house, it must be unpainting it after it's been inexpertly painted.

Despite my best intentions expressed so firmly before leaving France that we'd do nothing to the house for a year, all that flaking paint and the creaking doors have got the better of me and so far the score since arriving back four weeks ago today, is one pirate ship, one larger hole in the living room wall than was once the case, and one bedroom almost denuded.

The colour revealed once the layers of time have been removed may once have provoked a "what were they thinking?" response from ourselves, but now, well it's sort of cheerful, and it reminds us of another place, another time. (click on the link or see the photo below!)

For an instant one of us considered leaving it, a blue-green sky dotted with friendly clouds...... but the rest of us thought I'd like to paint it quite soon please.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

It's hard to believe that we've been back two weeks.
Even with the fog on our brains now dissolved we seem to have been living in something of a whirlwind.

We've been seriously planning what to do with the house, even knocked out a wall for good measure. We've walked along the beach twice a day with the mighty Grand Dog while trying to figure out what we might knock out next.

But Mr Four becomes Mr Five tomorrow and there was a pirate ship to build, so that seemed like a good place to start. It was nice to be hanging round boats again if I do say so myself.

Monday, October 03, 2011

When one resorts to posting pictures of one's grand-dog on one's blog, it's probably time to hang up the keyboard for a time.

We are taking it easy, sleeping in fits, getting to know the house we left not quite settled in.

Even after a lifetime of living on this side of the world, the cars suddenly seem stupidly large, the sky similarly so, and drivers on the freeways just stupid.

I had panicked for a bit on Friday, desperately trying to get all that had to be done, done before the shops closed on midday Saturday, to be gently reminded that they don't. We went into a well known European brand of supermarket this morning and as is my custom, I made a bee line for the non grocery items on sale. Browsing, I was surprised to find myself reading the instruction label on an item without faltering, and even more surprised to discover it was written in English.

I think we are a little disoriented, but to be fair to us we've been away a while and we will need to once again familiarise ourselves with some things.

Last Tuesday, in a Post Office in London we were scrambling to rid ourselves of change and found a gold coin that should have been a Pound, but it seemed too thin. We couldn't work it out, so asked the lady in the queue behind if she could tell us what it was.

Saturday, October 01, 2011

The only thing wrong is that it's not much after five in the morning, and we should really be tucked up in bed with all the sensible people. We've been awake for a while, thinking that it was an hour later than it was thanks to Mr Telstra thinking that we live in NSW and changing all our automatically updating clocks to daylight saving time.

So we sit on the beach for a bit, and pinch ourselves to remind us that we aren't actually dreaming all this.

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Fading memories

Douglas Adams observed quite rightly that dishwashers wash tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, and video recorders watch tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself.

Had he still been among us, and for some inexplicable reason stumbled upon these pages he may quite rightly have observed that this blog is simply here to remember things for us, thereby saving us that particular bother and allowing us to get on with the next bit of our lives without distraction, our adventures safely tucked away for a time when we may well need to recall them.